Berlin Ruling May Hinder
Jewish Restitution Efforts

Court Declares Invalid Applications
Filed by Jewish Claims Conference

BERLIN -- A court ruling has dealt a blow to a decade-long effort to win compensation for expropriated Jewish property in eastern Germany.

The decision, issued here last month, invalidated a sweeping set of applications filed by the Jewish Claims Conference in 1992 that had been accepted by German authorities in thousands of previous cases.

If it is upheld, the Berlin ruling would mar the record of the JCC, the most powerful lever in reclaiming property seized by the Nazis during World War II. The organization celebrated its 50th anniversary Wednesday, with guests such as German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer praising the group for negotiating settlements on stolen properties and art and on slave labor.

At stake in the Berlin ruling are thousands of unresolved claims. The decision, if upheld, could also prompt challenges to the 8,000 claims that have already been awarded in favor of the JCC, according to legal experts. Since claims started to be processed, in 1993, the JCC has collected 1.6 billion marks (about $725 million, converted from euros at the current rate) in settlements for Jewish property in the former East Germany.

Karl Brozik, the JCC's top representative in Germany, said his organization has appealed the ruling to Germany's federal administrative court and is optimistic it will be reversed. "It goes against the spirit in which the German government has been working with us for the last 10 years," he said.

Restitution has been made for many property claims in western Germany, but progress has been slower in the country's east, where courts and bureaucracies are more willing to challenge such claims. Although applications were accepted only after Germany's unification in 1990, claimants are sometimes viewed as opportunists, returning to take back property their families haven't owned for as long as seven decades.

The German government is trying to prevent one family from reclaiming land that belonged to the Wertheim department-store chain, in one instance arguing that the expropriation was fair and square. Germany has indicated it could try to use last month's ruling to fight the Wertheim case.

The Berlin ruling involves a run-down apartment building at the corner of Defreggerstrasse and Karpfenteichstrasse, in a working-class neighborhood of former East Berlin. The building was once owned by Mathilde Fischer, a Polish Jew. In 1937, before the Nazi regime forced her to move back to Poland, she sold it to Rose-Marie Zeumer, a German, and is believed to have later died in the Holocaust. After the war, Ms. Zeumer ended up in West Germany, separated from the four-story apartment house by the Berlin Wall.

After German reunification, the government gave people two years to claim land, homes, businesses and other assets that had been taken by East Germany. Ms. Zeumer did so before the Dec. 31, 1992, deadline.

But at the same time, the JCC was filing applications -- thousands of them -- for individual properties it was able to identify. For many of the claims, however, the JCC could find only sketchy information: Owners had died or disappeared, records had been lost, street names and numbers had changed. Seven days before the deadline, it filed a "global application" to cover any Jewish properties it would name at later dates. A 1994 filing identified the Defreggerstrasse building, based on an address book found in a Jewish community center in Krakow, Poland.

In 2000, the Berlin restitution authority awarded the property to the JCC. Two sons and a daughter of Ms. Zeumer, who had since died, appealed to the Berlin administrative court.

The court said it was likely Ms. Fischer was forced to sell the building under Nazi persecution. But it overturned the restitution authority's decision, saying the JCC's global application was invalid because it lacked information on specific properties. The 1994 filing "needs no further consideration," the court wrote in rejecting it. It noted that its interpretation of the global application could have consequences for other restitution cases.

"It's not fair," said Moshe Sanbar, chairman of the Center of Organization of Holocaust Survivors, arguing that the two-year claim deadline was meant for people who were alive and aware of their lost assets. The JCC couldn't possibly identify every Jewish property in time, he said, because so many owners were "killed or had disappeared."

"We had to send a delegation to Moscow because they took a lot of German records there," he said.